Present
by Musafreen
Summary: A look into the heads of the Animorphs, towards the late-middle parts of the war. Ranging from the obtuse to the pointless. All dramatic, but of course. XD
1. Homework

**Homework**

Blank.

That was all that was going on in his head. Utter blankness. The kind of blankness which wipes out the empty white expanse his mind fell into by default, and replaces it with something…so utterly lifeless that it's like sleep. A living, breathing sleep. Of course, sleep was always breathing, but there was something about the phrase which fell into the preconceived building blocks of the mind.

He wasn't blank anymore, was he?

He sighed, running hands through hair. He couldn't, for the life of him, figure out what the heck was going on in front of him. Math had never been his best subject; then again, it hadn't been his worst either. He couldn't remember either extreme, just the fact that at some point, bored in some class, he and Marco had made a list of lesser and greater evils.

_Get to it_. A voice ordered impatiently. _Figure it out, or make something up. It isn't important._

His fingers traced letters, numbers, symbols (Greek, he recalled vaguely. Why was there Greek in Math?), his lips curled sardonically. He was giving _himself_ orders now. Only surprising it hadn't happened earlier.

There was something here, about three dimensional planes never crossing each other. Strictly, the planes were two dimensional, only enclosed in three dimensional space. With one direction it could never know, even think of.

He snorted. Marco was right, they were all one helmacron baby step away from the loony bin, in solitary with a straitjacket.

That's how the Ellimist sees us. The part of him which wanted to bother with thinking, the one which would have preferred a long, non-breathing sleep, mused. Planes in three dimensions. Chess pieces.

Except that chess pieces were three dimensional.

There was a snap, he looked down in mild surprise. The pen he'd been using was split cleanly into two at some point along it's length. He didn't notice where, exactly. Insignificant. Like so many things. His life was being crowded by matters slightly higher up in the chain of ultimate global importance. Weak points of a hork-bajir, or bernoullis' theorem? Somehow the choice wasn't all that hard to make.

He sighed again, dragged out a new pen and scribbled something else along his paper, yawning every few seconds. Sleep. He needed sleep. Lots of it, if at all possible; but naturally, it wasn't.

Fair.

What a crazy notion.

He got a D minus the next day, and the look from his teacher that was routine. It said something along the lines of _Kid, you're ruining your life._

_Only in your world, not mine._


	2. Humility

**Humility**

Everyone has something they want to fight for, (or endure fighting for, but it was want in her case) something to guide them through depths of despair and self-doubt and all the rest of it. More often than not, the something is a bundle of erratically strung little things, of hardly any consequence in the larger scheme of everything. But nevertheless, sorely missed when not there. What was it again, you don't notice the cricket in the hearth till it stops chirping?

She figured her sisters were one of those things. Jordan and Sarah. Among the most annoying beings to walk the face of the earth. And yeah, so neither of them ever got annoying to the level of old Esplin 9466. But then again, neither of them ever really tried to murder her.

Well, not deliberately, anyway.

"Sarah, put that thing down!" she yelled. She'd been yelling things all evening. Two hours or so by now. "You could hurt someone."

Sarah gave her an indignant look, and a lengthy discourse which pretty much amounted to "Geez, Rachel. I'm not four. I know perfectly well how to use scissors, so why don't you drag your patronizing big sister butt someplace else?" while Jordan looked increasingly smug in the background with each passing second.

She exhaled noisily. This wasn't something she planned for. She never figured Jordan would get wise to her dumping all the babysitting assignments onto her. And she definitely didn't figure being so out of touch with handling her sisters. For gods' sake, what happened to the time she could silence them with a glare and an accompanying word?

_Gone with the Yeerks, I guess. _

Jordan cleared her throat, and she gave up. Her sister had just worn down the most enthusiastic warrior in the fight against the alien invasion of the Earth. Too bad she had absolutely no idea about it.

"All right, I admit it." She conceded. "I have no clue about babysitting. You are the master of babysitting. Now please help me out before I go psycho and kill someone."

The self-satisfied smirk grew. Jordan set about placating Sarah with chocolate ice-cream and cartoon videos while she watched, bemused. It was so simple. Why couldn't she think about something that _simple_?

_In battle there is no time for thinking. There's only time to react._

Whatever. It still figured that her second sister was better at dealing with her third sister than she was. It was annoying. And it made her feel slightly envious. And somewhat humiliated. And very, very, _very _slightly heartbroken. If only there was some way to save the world without the drifting away part.

"Hey, Rachellll…" Jordan sang, holding up the third (where'd that come from?) bowl of ice cream like a trophy. "Want some, oh almighty defeated one?"

Sarah giggled. Jordan smirked. She felt her lips twitching, but she made a face in time to save face, and sat down to watch Disneys' _Hercules._


	3. Human

**Human**

Hawks didn't use words.

He supposed that eventually, what had happened to his expressions could happen to his thoughts. In that moment of capture, after sometimes hours of tracking, watching, waiting, with the kind of concentration possible only to a creature with no other thought whatsoever in it's head. The moment where all that expectation culminated in warm blood in his talons, in a beating heart eventually silenced, the pure thrill of filling himself with what he was _made_ to eat...

He shivered.

Not because of his thoughts. Natures' cycle of predator and prey had ceased to disturb him long ago. To someone who had spent all of last week in the California sun, the sudden entry to an air-conditioned bookstore was something of a jolt. Then, of course, there was all the usual feelings he associated with being indoors. Claustrophobia. The artificial. The feeling of being in control no longer. Of _community._

And then there was this body, one weakness upon another. Eyes near blindness. Ears that had to strain to catch glimmers of sound. The pitiful slowness.

_Trapped._ All his hawk senses screamed.

Except that he wasn't a hawk, was he? Not here, not in this body. Not anywhere, really, except in those moments of predation. Hawks never thought in words, and they never thought about things like problems and relationships and morality.

And yeah, he was pretty sure they never thought about gorgeous blonds with warrior complexes either.

But humans -of a certain kind- often thought about books, and so here he was. Not really browsing as much as hunting down that new novel. The author had a distinct, somewhat disturbing style perfectly matched to his weary pessimism; and he still thought a book was _-forgive me, Rachel-_ a better buy than most other things.

Weak human eyes or not, he was still a hunter. Three minutes later, he was at the cash counter, fingering the few dollars he'd taken from Axs' book fund. The flourescent lights were getting to him, the claustrophobia worsening. The sooner he got out of here, the better.

The middle aged woman in front of him moved, and he set down the book on the counter with some relief. The girl at the counter -a teenager a little older than him, maybe- spared him an interested glance. Halfway, anyway. He could swear the other half moved closer to whatever alarm was hidden below the counter.

Wordlessly, she processed his bill. Equally wordlessly, he paid it. Then he grabbed the book and pretty much fled -_or was it flew?-_ for the exit.

Outside was a relief: Air. Sky. No large bodies of water to be seen. A wistful smile spread across his face. Maybe he was more hawk than he thought. The clock was even ticking to remind him of this. He'd spent an inordinate amount of time wandering around doing nothing, and two hours didn't seem too far off. All it took was a secluded alleyway and a couple of minutes. A hawk was now clutching a paperback.

The book was light enough, but he didn't want to risk anyone catching a hawk attempting to carry it. Glumly, he remorphed. Again into the human body. What had he been thinking? Read? Since when did he have the time to _read?_ Surveillance was an all-time job, he'd found that out from the beginning.

Maybe Ax could take a look at it. The guy was capable of reading through the entire dictionary -and memorizing the whole thing- in a few hours.

He walked, not in a straight line, but however the constructions permitted. He passed a couple of blocks, avoided a construction site and stepped through a park.

Human. Humans. Civilization. Unconcerned of the impending doomsday.

And a few of them were reading. One was definitley reading the same book he had.

He looked at his hand. Package and fingers, not meat and talon. No person should ever be forced to go through this sort of identity crisis. It was horrendously unfair, and if he complained any more he wouldn't have the time to do anything else.

Someone threw a frisbee. Someone yelled. Someone laughed.

An excited little puppy brushed him as it chased after the blue blob, tongue hanging out, tail furiously wagging, happy the way only one of those Pemalites' descendants could be happy. He laughed.

Hawks didn't laugh, either.

What the heck. The world could deal with one hour of missing surveillance.

And thinking that, he sat down on the grass and opened the book.


	4. Hedonist

**Hedonist**

The mongrel, a mixture of the ugliest shades of browns and reds, limped over to her and nuzzled her calf. She paused to scratch it under the ears before going back to cleaning (Rachel would have called it ruining a perfectly good pair of jeans) the barn.

She loved doing this, all alone in the place where so much of her life had been centered around, both before and after. Other people dropped by on occasion of course; her Dad, bringing in the latest causality. Her Mom, alternatively checking up on her or restocking the medical supplies. Tobias, when he felt in dire need of human companionship. Ax, for reasons of his own, mostly food and books. (At times like this though, it was just her. She suspected they were avoiding work.)

The barn so was much more than just her sanctum, but in moments like this, it was comforting to think of it that way.

She backed the last shovelful of dirt into the corner, stripped off her rubber gloves and sat down on a convenient haystack. It was evening, there were no missions at the moment, and for once, she wasn't backed up on homework. The mongrel limped over determinately, wagging it's tail until she scratched under it's ear again. Around her, birds shreiked or slept, depending on their level of sedation. Tiny mammals curled around themselves, their bodies moving in rhythm to their breathing.

Somewhere outside, an owl hooted softly.

She shivered. This was her home. This was her world. Terror and beauty rolled into one, farce and tragedy moving along so close to each other, the lines between them ceased to exist. And amidst that, all the while, she thought about things (people, really); it was in her nature. Marco analyzed plot, she analyzed personalities. And both of them were so good at it, she sometimes wondered higher powers were watching over this whole madness. She knew of at least two.

She thought about their personalities too, and whatever she'd come up with had been disturbing. Each of them had lines drawn, and each of them came closer and closer to crossing them each day. She worried about what would happen towards the end (if there ever _was_ an end), how they'd ever go back to living. Easy enough to imagine if they lost, of course; but if they won...

To tell the truth, neither scenario looked good. Jake would be judging himself, Tobias would still be torn, Ax and Marco would be bored, and Rachel...

She shivered, her solace interuppted.

Eventually, something would happen. Eventually, the fight would end for better or for worse. Eventually, all of them would have to face what they were (or what they could be) inside.

She did that now. Every day for her was a constant battle between what was over the line and what was not. She fought, she cried. For each soul she killed. She made sure of that, because then when she would go up against judgement with herself in the end, win or lose, she would be in peace.

The mongrel nudged her again, displeased at being ignored. She smiled at it and went back to it's ears.


End file.
